-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Maurine H Beasley, Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 597–598, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae219
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
This perceptive work looks closely at the underlying ideas on gender and race behind the women's divisions of the major political parties in the mid-twentieth century. Using a partial biographical approach, Melissa Estes Blair presents the philosophies and work of five white women, Molly Dewson, Dorothy McAllister, Gladys Tillett, India Edwards, and Bertha Adkins, who spearheaded partisan outreach to women voters through women's divisions from the Franklin D. Roosevelt era through the Dwight D. Eisenhower years. Adkins was a Republican, and the other four were Democrats. Blair contends that the presidents they served, Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Eisenhower, had personal relationships with these heads of women's divisions and gave them more credit for contributions to electoral victories than did male advisers. Edwards's alliance with Truman is particularly explored.
Based on painstaking research in archival collections at the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower libraries, Bringing Home the White House shows how little attention the women's divisions of both parties paid to Black women voters. Blair affirms that the women's divisions were geared to white middle-class housewives who personified a feminism that believed women voters had different ideals and interests than men. Nevertheless, she concludes that the women's divisions, eliminated in midcentury with the expressed intent of integrating women fully into main party structures, served a useful purpose by making tens of thousands of women more politically aware. Interestingly, the five women focused on here did not fit the housewife model by any means—two, Dewson and Adkins were lesbians; McAllister functioned as a single mother to carry on her political work; Tillett also was a working mother and Edwards had a long career as a journalist before turning to politics. All five provided proof that the popular concept of midcentury women confined to the home ignored women who moved beyond it.
